I decided to test my husband and told him: “Honey, I got fired!” — but the truth was, I’d been promoted….

Something else was going on. Something darker. And I was starting to feel it rise beneath my skin.

The instinct to survive. The instinct to know the truth before it destroyed me first. Looking back, the signs had been there long before I ever uttered a word about being fired.

They weren’t glaring red flags, at least not at first. Just small things. The way Brian started coming home later and later.

Always with a vague excuse. The way his phone, once casually left on the kitchen counter, was now always face down, locked tight. Or how he’d started skipping our Saturday breakfasts.

Something we’d done religiously for years. With nothing more than a shrug and a maybe next time. I told myself it was just stress.

His construction firm had taken on a massive downtown project. And he was working more than usual. I wanted to believe that.

I really did. Because the alternative, the creeping suspicion that the man I’d shared a bed with for 10 years might be slipping away, was too painful to face. But the moment that lodged itself into my memory, the one I kept playing over and over again in my mind, happened two months before I tested him.

I’d gotten off work early one Friday. My team had wrapped a product launch ahead of schedule. And I thought it’d be sweet to surprise Brian.

Cook his favorite dinner, open a bottle of wine, bring back a little piece of us that I’d been missing lately. I let myself into the house, quietly, thinking I’d catch him working in the living room. But as soon as I opened the front door, I heard his voice coming from down the hallway.

He was on the phone, speaking in a tone I hadn’t heard before, serious, clipped almost rehearsed. No, she doesn’t suspect anything yet, he said, followed by a long pause. We just need a little more time.

And then he laughed. Not the warm, playful laugh I used to know. This was something else.

Cold, detached, almost cruel. I stood frozen in the hallway, clutching the doorframe, my heart pounding in my ears. He was talking about me.

I knew it. I didn’t hear the other person’s voice. Maybe it was on speaker, maybe not.

But I could feel the weight of the conversation settle on my chest like a stone. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.

Then, as if nothing had happened, he walked out of the bedroom, saw me and smiled, kissed me on the cheek like it was any ordinary day. I smiled back, went into the kitchen, started boiling pasta, but something in me cracked that evening. A quiet fracture, invisible on the outside, but spreading quickly underneath the surface.

From that day on, I started watching him differently, listening more carefully, picking up on the subtle shifts in his behavior, the way he avoided talking about the future, the way he grew impatient when I asked about his day, the little lies he told without even realizing I’d caught them. I wasn’t crazy. I wasn’t being paranoid.

My gut was screaming at me, and I was finally listening. It was a strange kind of grief, mourning the slow death of something while still pretending it was alive. I kept telling myself to wait, to collect more signs, to be sure, until that moment in the hallway after my fake firing when the last of my illusions finally fell apart…